[R] read.table() and scientific notation

[January Weiner]

> Note: this is advocacy for education in clear quantitative
> language and is a border-line off topic rant...
>
> The other day I read a paper from a student who used notation
> like 2e-4 in the text - blech!  I sent it back for revisions.

You have sent it back for revisions just because the student used a
version of the scientific notation that can be routinely found in
literature? Hm. I am _teaching_ my students to understand the
scientific notation in the form "1e-20" etc. - for example, because
many programs in the field (including R) are representing real numbers
using this version of scientific notation. I wouldn't penalize a
student for using it in a scientific text. That's what the proof
reading is for (if the editors are picky).

> Lately I have noticed here and in other places this tendency to
> use floating point notation (also referred to as exponential
> notation) where scientific notation is appropriate, and vice
> versa.  The notation 2e-4 is a convenient way to express floating
> point numbers with a simple text string, but it is certainly not
> scientific notation.

Depends how formal and picky you wish to be. 2e-4 is the same as
$2\times10^{-4}$ to me as it is for most people, I guess (e.g. look at
the Wikipedia entry).

> No wonder you had trouble googling it!

Nope. The problem with googling is that most of the pages you get when
googling for "R" do not refer to "R" as the statistical language.

Cheers,

January


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